arlyle's strength and weakness. It
is not meant that Carlyle's mind remained anchored to the philosophic
idealism of _Sartor_. In later days he professed contempt for
transcendental moonshine, but his contempt was for the form and jargon
of the schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to the end.
After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage, his views took more and
more an anthropomorphic mould, till in many of his writings he seems
practically a Theist. But at root Carlyle's thought was more
Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the German conception of
the Ultimate Reality? The German answer grew out of an attempt to get
rid of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the father of all the
Empiricists, in giving logical effect to Berkeleyism, concluded that
just as we know nothing of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so
of the inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental impressions. We
can combine and recombine these impressions as we choose, but from them
we cannot deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of mind.
Hume would not sanction belief in causation as a universal law. All that
could be said was that certain things happened in a certain manner so
frequently as to give rise to a law of expectation. But this is not to
solve, but to evade the problem? We are still driven to ask, What is
matter? What is motion? What is force? How do we get our knowledge of
the material world, and is that knowledge reliable? These are wide
questions that cannot be adequately handled here. It was a favourite
argument of Comte and his followers, that man's first conceptions of
Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they were anthropomorphic.
Theology was, therefore, dethroned without ceremony. But science is as
anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee that the great facts
of Nature are as we think them. We talk of Force, but our idea of Force
is taken from experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature. It is
well known, for example, that the secondary qualities of objects,
colour, &c., do not exist in Nature. Our personality is so inextricably
mixed with the material universe that it is impossible to formulate a
philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a product of Nature, and
which sharply defines the provinces of the two.

But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism promises
to perform. Idealism is simply Materialism turned upside down. The only
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